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View SlideshowRequest to buy this photoRandy Harris | THE NEW YORK TIMESBillie Weiss, 2, and her 7-year-old brother, Riley, have plenty of fun sharing one of the two bedrooms in their family’s New York apartment.

By Michael TortorelloNEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE • Sunday April 13, 2014 5:26 AM

NEW YORK — Caleb and Harper can’t share a bedroom forever. For now, Rachel Goldstein cites a
number of not-unconvincing reasons to keep her 7-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter together in
the family’s brownstone.

For one thing, there is a conservation of parenting energy.

“I can’t imagine having to do two bedtimes,” Goldstein said recently.

And the siblings entertain each other — if by
entertain you mean
cage-fight.

But the best reason is that Goldstein, a social worker, and her husband, a lawyer, have no other
choice.

Except for a spare room, the couple’s 1,150-square-foot home offers everything they could want:
a deck and backyard, a historic tree-lined block, a short walk to a park, a coveted elementary
school.

Goldstein can imagine moving to a three-bedroom home nearby. What she can’t yet fathom are the
$1.6 million listings.

Simple economics often present parents of opposite-sex children an impossible equation: The
family needs

to add a bedroom or

subtract a child.

Finances sometimes don’t stretch to a new, bigger home.

The other solution — shared quarters — seems elegant at first but quickly develops into a
high-stakes calculus.

The variables include age, gender, family dynamics and personality, and they change over
time.

But does the mixed-sex bedroom represent an inherent risk to children’s social and sexual
development?

“The answer is, we don’t know,” said Laurie Kramer, a professor of applied family studies at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who focuses her research on healthy sibling
relationships.

For all the scientific literature in her field, she said, “We haven’t really studied this.”

Another unknown is just how common the sibling arrangement is. The Census Bureau doesn’t try to
track it, and several demographers deemed the question a stumper.

But the 2011 New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey provided at least a few hints to Emily
Rosenbaum, a sociology professor at Fordham University and an expert on urban demography.

Of the city’s estimated 471,046 households with two children younger than 18, almost a third had
kids sharing a bedroom. And more than 4 percent of the homes had more than two children in a
bedroom.

Rosenbaum’s interest is not only academic, she explained in an email. Her 8-year-old twins, Tom
and Claire, share a bedroom in her Upper West Side home.

Rosenbaum initially divided the room with a barricade of bookshelves.

But the children would “drag all their toys, etc., out of their rooms and into the living room,”
she wrote. “The mess made me crazy.”

Now, the children sleep on one side, and their toys reside on the other.

A temporary wall would seem to be one way to settle brother and sister. Other parents get more
creative, said a representative of Manhattan Pressurized Walls, which constructs room dividers.

Some do “the French thing” — that is, a type of a dressing screen — Chinese blinds or vinyl
curtains.

And yet all fixes assume that something is broken and that children crave privacy.

Seven-year-old Riley “doesn’t like to be left alone,” said his mother, Jong Weiss. She and her
husband, who works in finance, adored their one-bedroom prewar in Brooklyn, but they didn’t
hesitate to snap up an apartment down the hall.

“When we moved to the two-bedroom,” she recalled, “We said, ‘You can have your own room.’ He
didn’t like that at all. He said: ‘I’ll be all by myself. I’ll be scared.’ ”

The arrival of his sister, Billie, was a boon. She is 2 years old, and the age gap is big enough
that Riley treats her not as a rival but as his charge.

“He takes her out of the crib for me,” Weiss said. “They take a shower together, and he bathes
her. He’s very helpful. Sometimes he understands her needs more than I do.”

If there is something to be squeamish about, “The kids are not aware of it,” she said.

So when does the slumber party have to end?

In the suburbs of North Brunswick, N.J., Stacey Rockman got used to questions from other parents
about when her husband, a cantor, planned to yield his home office to their children.

A year ago, Rafi started lobbying for his own space. Bashe, however, “was totally stressed out
about the idea,” Rockman recalled. “She said: ‘I don’t know how to sleep alone. He keeps me
company.’ ”

Not long after laying claim to his new room last summer, Rafi posted a sign on the door: “Get
Out.”

To be clear, his sister remains free to come and go, Rockman said.

“That’s probably for me,” she admitted.

Ideally, all children would hang a sign when they no longer feel comfortable, say, changing
clothes in front of a brother or sister.

Yet when they do start to complain, Kramer said, “They’re probably not going to complain about
the gender issue. They may say, ‘He’s taking over my space.’ Or, ‘She’s putting her clothes in my
side of the closet.’

“You’re going to hear more mild complaints that parents might brush off. And maybe they should
brush it off at first. But I think kids are going to be giving parents a message that this isn’t
working anymore.”